NOAA's Hurricane Research Division (HRD), part of the Atlantic Oceanographic
and Meteorological Laboratories (AOML) located in Miami, FL, is in the midst
of a multi-year experiment along with the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (AOC)
called the Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX). Developed in partnership
with NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and its Hurricane Center
(NHC), IFEX is intended to improve our understanding and prediction
of hurricane intensity change by collecting observations that will aid in the
improvement of current operational models and the development of the
next-generation operational hurricane model, the Hurricane Weather Research
and Forecasting model (HWRF). Observations also will be collected for
NESDIS' Ocean Winds
Experiment in a variety of tropical wind regimes as 'ground truth' for
remote sensing equipment.